Monday, June 13, 2011

D R E A M

Hi. I'm a fan of LittleBigPlanet 2. At the time of this writing, it's only recently been released. With the game only out for six days now, you would expect the servers to be flooded with buzz from new users. Surprisingly, apart from the well-respected authors of the site and some horrible generic levels I've probably played before on LittleBigPlanet or in another user's level under another guise, traffic was slow.

On March 2nd, I decided that I may as well play anything that seems interesting. After scrolling to the bottom of the "Cool Wall" for nearly two minutes, I came to the very end. There was something that caught my eye. It was a level I was immediately interested in.

It was called "D R E A M". The username of the person who posted the level was clearly Japanese, as it consisted entirely of Japanese symbols, and the description was entirely in Japanese (the text appeared to take up all the available space) as well. The only thing I thought odd was the fact that if the level did really come from Japan, a little "[JPN]" would have been included in the description as well.

Ignoring this un-inclusion, I made note that it had 138 plays, 43 comments, and 5 hearts. For some reason, that really stuck with me. I looked at the info and it was apparently one of those "Movie levels," so I wasn't expecting much use of the controller.

The image for the level showed an eyeless sackperson, screaming. It didn't look right at all, so I decided to head over to the comments section. Nearly all of the comments were in Japanese save one, which stated "lol jk. you decided to include the kill in the and kill the one." This freaked me out, but I decided to load up the level and play it anyway.

It took nearly four minutes to load the level and by the time it finished I was thinking my PS3 had crashed due to the probable complexity of the level. It started abruptly and startled me; I wasn't expecting it, so I reacted by jumping backwards and nearly screaming.

The level first displayed a still, IRL image of a dog (possibly a terrier) looking at the camera. This lasted for about five seconds before it cut to the inside of a dark room were a woman (her face is not revealed) was trying desperately to stand. It looked like something in the darkness was oppressing her. I was disturbed at this, as she made increasingly loud grunting noises followed by a shriek.

About thirty-two seconds in, a man started to shout random profanity before screaming something in Japanese. Even though I don't know much Japanese, I knew from the tone of his voice that it was something freaky I would rather not hear. It then, very slowly, showed a reddish figure rise from the darkness (I think it was the man).

At that point, the video started to look like an amateur film to the point where you couldn't make out any of his features; this disturbed me greatly. After another fifty-six seconds, he was fully standing but looked roughly like a blob. He appeared to run towards the screaming woman, but it could have been the opposite. It was hard to tell. Then, the visuals began to look corrupted and displayed what may very well be one of the most horrifying images I've ever seen.

It looked like a dog with its skin turned inside-out. It had a noose over its neck. There were no eyes in its sockets. It was covered in black hair from top to bottom. Afterward, the camera panned closer to the dog, until it eventually got to the point where the dog's anus was clearly visible. The amera attempted to go into the dog's innards, almost as if the man was trying to fist the dog with the camera. It would have been humorous if it wasn't for the disturbing situation.

The video went shutter screen afterward, as if it went so far in, its lens got caught in the dog's large intestine and the person had to manually remove the physical damage caused by this. The video was around a minute and thirty-eight seconds in at that point, with just over thirty seconds left in the video.

What happened next is hard to describe, but it was like a constantly distorted image of the video repeated in reverse and sped up X2. The motion and the images made me literally vomit. I had never, in my entire live, been subjected to such horrible images.

After three minutes and about 8 seconds, the level ends. I decided to choose the exit option as fast as I could. I ended up back in my pod, happy as usual. Traffic was booming at that point. Hundreds of levels were being published every minute in the short time I had been playing the level.

Afterwards, I couldn't sleep for five days. I eventually recovered from that near-traumatic experience and decided to upload a level about it (it now has around 5000 plays and 300 hearts). I tried to track the level down for hard proof of its existence, but when I typed the name of it into the search box, nothing came up. I tried this several times, but at that point it looked like it had been deleted. I've tried for nearly three months now to find the five people who hearted the level, but no luck.

The information level I posted became popular enough that some malicious bloke recently posted a level called "D R E A M [Unseen REAL level]". However, the six minute and thirty seconds long level looked and felt more like a Cadbury's dairy milk advert than the level I know so vividly.

But, you know...if the original D R E A M level was recorded instead of made, we could be onto something BIG.